Ever since Magic Eraser debuted on Google Pixel phones and later rolled out to the wider Android ecosystem, it’s been one of my favorite Google Photos features.
Using it was genuinely fun and amusing.
It was straightforward and generally effective at scrubbing background photobombers or touching up blemishes in portrait shots.
Over the years, Google has blessed it with meaningful upgrades, delegating tasks to increasingly capable AI models.
But a recent major update noticeably introduced complications in the tool’s algorithm.
Instead of enhancing Magic Eraser’s editing chops, the consensus has been highly mixed. Users have loudly reported messy fillers and inaccurate edits, with many simply dubbing it “AI slop.”
I decided to put it through its paces on my Android devices to see what all the fuss was about.
To my surprise, I found the new version is actually a step-up in generative fill, though I still hit some obvious roadblocks — especially with minor spot touches and smart suggestions.
Fortunately, I uncovered a simple trick: going offline. By disabling the internet using airplane mode, you can bypass these annoying new quirks when using Magic Eraser.
So, if you’re still struggling with weird AI generative frustrations today, here’s how to manage them.
Magic Eraser has become spotty
But I can live with it
Magic Eraser operates in two distinct ways. One is using cloud processing, which is the default for most phones, and the other is on-device processing, used as a fallback when there’s no access to the cloud.
In phones without on-board AI, you need an internet connection before AI features in Google Photos like Magic Eraser can be accessed.
On my Google Pixel 9 Pro XL and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7, I habitually rely on online processing, which I’ve found to be a bit snappier than forcing the on-device engine to do the heavy lifting.
Back in the good old days, it worked exactly as intended. I’d pull up the photo I needed to edit, launch Magic Eraser, and the tool would immediately offer smart suggestions.
It was brilliant at identifying distracting power lines in street shots or unwanted tourists lingering in the background.
With the new update, however, I noticed the tool’s predictive chops have gone missing.
I constantly find myself staring at an edit screen without suggestions, even when there’s a distinct separation between the subject and the background.
I painstakingly tested this on my Galaxy Z Flip 7 and still saw identical results. The suggestions are inexplicably missing in both local and cloud-backed photos.
I’m not sure if this is just a machine learning bug that dodged Google’s quality department’s radar.
Regardless, it’s beyond frustrating, as those suggestions used to be useful in initiating a clean edit.
But as it turns out, missing suggestions aren’t even the biggest gripe users reported earlier this year.
Magic Eraser weirdly fills stuff
And you can blame Google’s cloud
I haven’t experienced getting the extra earlobes or obvious artifacts in my edits that some users reported earlier.
I did, however, run a few head-to-head tests using both online and offline modes to see if there were truly significant differences.
I quickly noticed that leaving your internet connection active yields far more accurate and realistic generative fills.
The cloud model proves highly effective at photoshopping large areas, like erasing a crowd of people or wiping out a grid of pesky power lines.
Erased spots spanning paved floors and shadows are filled in more than modestly.
Plus, I found the cloud processing to be highly respectable when tackling complex background textures, like the wooden planks as seen in the first set of screenshots.
However, it’s far from foolproof.
The cloud AI consistently starts to miss when analyzing smaller, more modest areas in an image.
For example, I tried to erase a stray sign on a pole, and the AI decided to replace it with a floating patch of grass and dirt instead of just generating the rest of the pole.
It also leaves behind a weird, smudgy smear for minor spot corrections, like removing a bolt head from a brick wall.
In those cases, I toggled on the offline mode and got a much more acceptable shot with noticeably smoother grass blending.
Still, the results will vary and depend on the complexity of the image.
Should you go offline when editing with Magic Eraser?
As a general rule, staying connected to the cloud gives you access to a much more powerful processing engine, but that depends on Google’s current model behaving itself.
If the model living in the cloud is currently in a messy state, it’s likely going to ruin the process. This likely happened back when Google shipped a new update to Google Photos.
With that, a fallback to on-device processing through toggling airplane mode might be a better alternative than a hallucinating AI.
I’m not entirely sure whether this exact procedure will apply to the Pixel 10 and its Tensor G5, considering it boasts significantly beefier onboard neural processing than my Pixel 9 Pro XL.
Alternatively, you can test the offline mode before committing to it.
